I was able to connect to SHOUTcast server via sockets. I try to send audio data to server, but I haven't idea how to calculate quality (bitrate) in each of the packages. Could someone explain this to me?
I open the mp3 in binary mode.
loop ?
The bit rate is set by the encoder. It doesn't have anything to do with your SHOUTcast connection really. Configure your encoder for whatever bit rate you need.
Related
I am trying to loop audio from my Icecast server 24/7.
I have seen examples where people talk about storing their audio files on the EC2 instance or in an S3 bucket.
Do I also need a source client running on my EC2 Instance to be able to stream audio to the server? Or is there a way to play static files from Icecast?
Icecast and SHOUTcast servers work by passing a live audio stream from a source on to the users. You need something to produce a single audio stream in realtime from those source files.
The flow looks something like this:
Basically, you'll need to do everything you would in a normal radio studio, but automated. You'll stream the files from your bucket, play them to a raw audio stream, send that stream to your encoder to be compressed with the codec, and then sent to your streaming servers for distribution.
You can't simply push your audio files as-is to the Icecast server, for a few reasons:
Stream must be realtimeThe server doesn't really know or care about the timing of the stream. It takes the data its given and sends that off to the client. Therefore, if you push data faster than realtime, the server will attempt to deliver it to the client at this faster rate. Some clients will attempt to buffer this fast stream, but most will put backpressure on the stream, causing the TCP window to close, causing the client to eventually get far enough behind that the server drops the connection.
Consistent format is requiredChances are, your source files have varying sample rate, channel count, and even codec. Most clients are unable to take a change in sample rate or channel count mid-stream. I don't know of any client that supports a codec change mid-stream. (Theoretically possible with Ogg and Matroska/WebM, but yeah... not worth messing with.)
Stream should be free of ID3 tags and other file format cruftIf you simply PUT your files directly to your Icecast server, the output stream will contain more than just the audio data. At a minimum, you'd want to remove all that. Depending on your container format, you'll need to deal with timestamps as well.
Solutions
There are a handful of ways to solve this:
Radio automation softwareMany folks simply run something like RadioDJ on cloud-based servers. If you already have a radio station that uses automation, this might be a good solution. It can be expensive though, and not as flexible. You could even go as low as VLC or something for playout, but then you wouldn't have music transitions and what not.
Custom playout script (recommended)I use a browser engine, such as Chromium, and script my channels with normal JavaScript. From there, I take the output stream and pass it off to FFmpeg to encode and send to the streaming servers. This works really well, as I can do all my work in a language everybody knows, and I have easy access to data on cloud-hosted services. I can use the Web Audio API to mix and blend audio based on what's happening in realtime. As an alternative, there is Liquidsoap, but I do not recommend it these days as its language is difficult to deal with and it is not as flexible as a browser engine.
I manged to run WebRTC peerconnection example, but it is not running on the browser.
I'm trying to find a way to stream both video and audio from browser to my native program.
Is there any way?
It can be done. WebRTC is designed to work in a peer-to-peer manner between two WebRTC agents (typically a Web Browser). Your native program needs to become the second peer.
If you need to rely on open source components a good starting point is:
OpenSSL for the DTLS key exchange.
libsrtp to encrypt the RTP packets.
ffmpeg to decode the PCM audio from the browser (libvpx if you need to do video).
You'll also need to handle the ICE negotiation which requires processing STUN messages. Also extract the media payloads from the RTP packets. All these steps are also after you've determined a signalling method to exchange the SDP offer and answer between you app and the browser.
As you've probably realised starting from scratch it's a major task. There are probably some commercial libraries that will do the job and save you a lot of pain.
If that doesn't scare you and you do still want to make an attempt using open source components this example "may" help. The sample is doing the reverse of what you've asked and is sending a video stream to Chrome rather than receiving an audio stream. The useful aspect is the connection negotiation. The sample program is able to get RTP packets flowing which is often the main problem.
The example is also using Windows Media Foundation which is Windows specific. It also has lots of shortcuts particularly with the RTP and STUN packet processing.
Summary: How do I stream high quality video using WebRTC native?
I have an h264 stream that's 1920x1080 at about 30fps. I can currently stream this from a server on localhost to a native client on localhost just fine.
I wrote a WebRTC server using Google's WebRTC native library. I've written a VideoEncoder and VideoEncoderFactory that takes frames consisting of already encoded data and and broadcasts it over a video track. Using this I can send my h264 stream to the WebRTC server over a pipe and I can see the video stream in a browser.
However, any time something moves the video gets corrupted. It continues to play but is full of artifacts. Eventually I discovered that WebRTC is dropping some of my frames. When I attach a sequentially increasing ID to each frame before I pass it to rtc::AdaptedVideoTrackSource::OnFrame and I log this same ID in webrtc::VideoEncoder::Encode I can see that some of my frames simply disappear.
This kind of makes sense, I'm trying to stream high quality video over something meant for video chat and lowing my framerate fixes the corruption. However, I'm not asking the WebRTC library to do a lot, it's just forwarding already encoded data to a client on localhost. I have a native app that does this fine and I've seen one browser WebRTC client that can do this. Is there a field in the SDP or some configuration change that will allow me to stream my video?
This was the solution How to control bandwidth in WebRTC video call? .
I had heard about changing the offer sdp but dismissed it because I was told that the browser will accept unlimited bandwidth by default and that you'd only need to to this if you want to limit bandwidth. However, adding "b=AS:high number" has fixed all of my problems.
I've developed an app which sends RTP packets to a local ip client. So the client has to listen on the specified port (rtp://:#portnumber, on VLC) to play the streamed data. Right now i'm going to develop the code needed to create the SDP file needed to start streaming.
My doubt is, how to send this file to the client? At the beginning of the RTP stream?
Really n00b at this point. Any help will be useful.
Thanks
VLC specifically supports RTSP, HTTP, SAP protocols for establishing session and communication. And of course the local file system (file://)
so basically you can call vlc in some manner like this (I cannot test it but should be like this):
vlc file://path/to/sdp-file
or
vlc rtsp://server-path:port/sdpfile.sdp
and so on
Aside from storing the SDP file in the local system, perhaps HTTP would be easiest if you have up and running http server on your server machine.
Do you guys have any suggestions on free/paid solutions for recording video from webcam and storing it on the wowza media server? I tried the wowza recording example but I couldn't figure out how I can set the server connection as a variable.
Thanks!
Try HDFVR, a paid flash application, but very good.
The wowza recording example should work for this. When you say you couldn't "figure out how to set the server connection as a variable", is that from the client to tell Wowza to record, or to play back the already recorded stream? Using the built-in http provider here http://www.wowza.com/forums/content.php?123 will allow you to make post requests to the Wowza server to start and stop recording.